After months of pressure, a ski run and restaurant at Canterbury’s Mt Hutt are being renamed. David Williams reports
A ski field has quietly wiped a Nazi officer’s name from its slopes – but not from the entire mountain.
Willi Huber, a pioneer of Canterbury ski field Mt Hutt, lauded as the ‘father of the mountain’ in a 2017 TVNZ Sunday programme, died in August last year, aged 97.
However, the ski field’s promise to continue to honour him with the name of its restaurant and a ski run hit a swastika-shaped snag. The Austrian volunteered for the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the notorious SS, and became a decorated officer.
(SS is an abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, meaning “protective echelon”. It was founded by Adolf Hitler in 1925 as his personal bodyguards but grew with the rise of the Nazi movement, to 38 combat divisions comprising 950,000 men. Heinrich Himmler headed the SS from 1929.)
News of Huber being memorialised at Mt Hutt sparked a wave of outrage, especially in light of his comments to Sunday – the link to which was deleted last night – that Hitler was “clever”.
A petition was launched asking for Huber’s name to be scraped from the ski field was signed by thousands of people. The story was also picked up by the Jerusalem Post.
Last September, members of the NZ Jewish Council and the Holocaust Centre of NZ discussed the issue with Paul Anderson, the boss of NZSki, the company that operates Mt Hutt, and Queenstown fields The Remarkables and Coronet Peak. After the meeting, Mt Hutt’s manager told Stuff the names of the restaurant and ski run would only be changed if evidence was presented linking Huber to war crimes.
Nothing has been said publicly since.
But a search of Mt Hutt’s website this week revealed Huber’s Run has been removed from the ski field’s trail map and the restaurant had been renamed Ōpuke Kai. (Ōpuke is the Māori name for Mt Hutt. NZ Ski has asked iwi Ngāi Tahu if it’s comfortable for that name to be used.)
Anderson, the NZSki boss, confirms the changes. The decision was made early this year and the changes were implemented a month ago, he said.
“We’ve had to take care on the way through to respect the views of a wide range of people and recognise that there were diverse opinions on the issue. We’ve just come to our decision that it’s time to move forward.”
Speak Your Mind